T. S. Eliot, (1888-1965) recast 20th century English poetry with a whole new vocabulary of technique, giving voice to a bold, vibrantly original Modernist style. In addition to his poetry, his body of work includes many landmark critical essays, as well as plays such as The Cocktail Party and Murder in the Cathedral. In 1948, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Daniel Halpern is the president and publisher of Ecco. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Tango and Something Shining, and the founder and long-time editor of the literary magazine Antaeus. He was born in Syracuse, New York, and lives in New York City.

Julie Strand is a retired psychologist in Seattle.

Natalie Diaz, the founder of the Twiniversity website and director of the Manhattan Twins Club, has been featured widely in the media. She lives in New York City with her husband and their fraternal twins.

Frank Bidart is the author of Metaphysical Dog (FSG, 2013), Watching the Spring Festival (FSG, 2008), Star Dust (FSG, 2005), Desire (FSG, 1997), and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (FSG, 1990). He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His book Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the 2017 National Book Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Creek Nation and was named United States Poet Laureate in 2019. The author of eight books of poetry and a memoir, Crazy Brave, her many honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes, the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize by Tupelo Press. Yoon was born in Busan, Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and MFA in Creative Writing at New York University. She has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, AWP’s WC&C Scholarship Competition, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems and translations have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, POETRY, The New York Times Magazine, and Korean Literature Now. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a PhD student studying Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

Willem Dafoe is an award-winning film, stage, and voice actor. He has starred in such films as Platoon, Shadow of the Vampire, The English Patient, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Spider-Man, The Boondock Saints, and numerous others. He can also be heard as the voice of Rat in Fantastic Mr. Fox and as Gill in Finding Nemo.

Tracy K. Smith is the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States and recipient of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Life on Mars. Duende, her second book, received the 2006 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation.

Jorie Graham is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including The Dream of the Unified Field, which won the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches at Harvard University. The recipient of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer, the Forward Prize and the International Nonino Prize, Graham's work is widely translated.

Kevin Young's first book, Most Way Home, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Lucille Clifton and won the Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares. His subsequent poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, Callaloo, and Code; his work has also been featured on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and in The Beacon Best of 1999. A former Stegner fellow in poetry at Stanford University, Young is currently an assistant professor of English and African American studies at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Eileen Myles is the author of more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Their books include Chelsea Girls and I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems 1975–2014. Their many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Art Writers’ Grant, a Lambda Book Award, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Art Writing, and the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America. They teach at New York University and Naropa University.

Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction. She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard.

Campbell McGrath is the author of several books. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares, among other prominent publications, and his poetry is represented in dozens of anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University.

Robert Hass is an acclaimed, award-winning American poet. He was poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He has won the National Book Award, and he shared the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation. His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

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